Awards Absolute spotlight six major mistakes to avoid when promoting events and festivals

Awards Absolute, Australia's first and only dedicated awards management company has shared the following six most common mistakes made by event organisers and promoters on Facebook:

1. Failing to include the date. So many pages force their potential visitors to go searching for this most pivotal piece of information. The solution: Create a banner image that is eye-catching, representative of the festivity and includes the dates it is to be held and preferably also the location (or the town if the name of your festival does not include this information). See the totally fake example above.

2. The ‘About’ information does not include basics. The solution: Edit this section on your page to include the name of your festival, where it is to be held (the town or city precinct), when it is to be held next, a sentence about what makes your festivity visit-worthy (it’s unique selling proposition) and another on what visitors will experience.

3. Single posts assume readers know all about your festivity already. The solution: Incorporate the dates and location (town or precinct) in EVERY post. This means that when your readers share that post those new to the notion of attending have the information at their fingertips. Rather than writing new text each time, we have a pro forma sentence that we use at the end of each post.

4. Insufficient information. Where do you buy tickets? Or arrange camping? Or see FAQs? The solution: Create a simple website (if you don’t have one already) that contains the information a visitor needs, including contact information. Then have a url link on the ‘details’ or ‘bio’ section of your Facebook or Insta page that takes the reader to your website.

5. Bad images that are wonky, fuzzy, lack appeal or all three. The solution: Even the best professional photographers admit to taking many, many more shots than they will ever use. That is because getting the best image is often trial and error. So, ask someone (it can be a volunteer) to take lots of shots of your festivity. As an average, for every post we share on Grey Nomad Awards we have taken three to four times as many photographs as the ones we share.

6. Only post in the lead up to the event, which means they reach fewer people due to the SM platform algorithms The solution: Post at least once weekly throughout the year. If you don’t have news about the event all year round then post about other things that visitors to your town or precinct will find interesting or helpful.

The Awards Absolute dedicated awards management company has 25 years of awards management and submission writing experience and absolute discretion.

Awards Absolute Chief Executive Liz Rivers has over 20 years awards specific experience creating new awards programs, injecting old awards programs with new vigour and relevance, training judges, producing gala awards events and writing winning award submissions.

Kim Morgan, Awards Absolute Director of Innovation, is a multi tourism award winner with 10 years awards experience. Morgan has judged many international awards programs and is a proficient program manager of numerous online awards platforms and awards management software.

For more information on Awards Absolute go to awardsabsolute.com/